道場で泣き戦場で笑う dōjō de naki senjō de warau Cry in the dojo - Laugh on the battlefield
道場で泣き戦場で笑う (dōjō de naki senjō de warau), weep in the dojo, laugh on the battlefield, is the training hall's rule that the hard work is done in the hall so the real contest is easy. It is good modern Japanese with no history in print: no dictionary and no book digitized to 1946 carries it.
Abstract
道場で泣き戦場で笑う, weep in the dojo, laugh on the battlefield, is a modern Japanese phrase of the training hall, attested in no dictionary and in no book digitized to 1946. It is grammatical, ordinary Japanese, a balanced couplet, and it carries no origin, author or age. The one prewar sentence that puts laughter on the battlefield, in a 1942 school reader, is a coincidence of words, not the couplet.
Overview
The sense. What a dojo says to itself: hard training now for the sake of the real thing later. It is the soldier's and the athlete's rule that the hard work is done in the hall so that the real contest is easy, and the Japanese puts it with tears and laughter. Modern Japanese, plain and correct, and without a history in print. It is not old, it is not scripture, and it carries a quotation from no one.
The words. 道場, dōjō, is the training hall; 戦場, senjō, the battlefield; 泣き, naki, the continuative of naku, to weep, and 笑う, warau, to laugh, so the phrase is a balanced couplet, weep in the dojo, laugh on the battlefield. The romaji doujou and senjou are keyboard spellings of dōjō and senjō.
The text in English. No Meiji bilingual dictionary and no printed English book carries the phrase. Word for word it is weep in the dojo, laugh on the battlefield, and weep is closer to 泣く than cry, which in English can also mean to shout.
The historical record
No book in the National Diet Library's full-text corpus of digitized books to 1946 carries the phrase, on the modern spellings or the prewar ones (道場で泣き, 道場で泣いて, 戦場で笑 and 戰場で笑) [1], and kotobank has no entry for it [2]. 道場で泣き returns no book. 戰場で笑 returns one, a 1942 school reader from Kagoshima, 『讃郷読本』 [3], whose sentence, 戰場で笑が出るやうになつたら、もう勝です, once you can laugh on the battlefield, you have already won, is a coincidence of words in a wartime schoolbook, not the couplet. The phrase lives in the halls and on the walls, and no school's own page names it as its motto.
What is not a source. The 1942 reader's laugh on the battlefield is the ordinary words in ordinary use, not the couplet, and is named here so a reader who runs the same search does not take it for a witness. The standard five-line 道場訓 that karate organizations post, 人格完成に努むること and its four fellows, does not contain the phrase. Whether 道場で泣き戦場で笑う is a Japanese saying that reached English, or an English gym saying that reached Japanese, the sources cannot say; the direction is not established.
A reading
A saying of what a dojo says, and a dojo's sayings mostly live in the air rather than in books, so the honest history of this one is short and says that. The phrase is good Japanese and means exactly what it appears to mean, and it carries no claim of an origin, an author or an age.
References
- National Diet Library Digital Collections, next-generation full-text search on the modern and prewar spellings of the phrase. https://lab.ndl.go.jp/dl/
- kotobank, search for 道場で泣き戦場で笑う: no entry. https://kotobank.jp/search?q=道場で泣き戦場で笑う
- 鹿児島市山下国民学校, 『讃郷読本』, 1942, National Diet Library Digital Collections. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1120725